#Buddhism and #Science: #Materialism is an Act of Faith, too, auto-da-fe’….

Every self-proclaimed atheist takes it as an article of faith (!) that the material world is the real world, and that any competing claims from the realms of religion and/or any other spurious metaphysics must be misguided at best, silly superstition most likely, at worst maybe even one of many conspiracy theory scenarios that inhabit the minds of the disenfranchised and disenchanted…

Yet materialism is indeed an article of faith. The only question is to what degree. The fact that it goes largely unquestioned in the modern world, with or without the atheistic conclusion, does not make it fact, and if questioned, its typical devotee will most likely defer to common sense, as if it’s so obvious that no explanation is required. These manifestations say as much about us modern humans, of course, as it does about the validity of the assumption…

Of course, common sense doesn’t get you far in modern physics, and that’s about all I can say, since making a fool of oneself by spouting unsubstantiated nonsense about modern physics is a fool’s paradise, and the sunny beaches are already full of those clowns. Suffice it to say that it’s not easily explained, so let’s just call the materialistic world the ‘world of appearances’ and leave it at that…

Archaic humans were far less attached to that materialistic assumption, of course, in direct proportion to their distance from the present era and the predominance of modern science. So our evolution as human beings very much parallels our increasing attachment to the materialistic paradigm and the consumeristic culture that operates in tandem with it. And if that progression seems so ridiculously obvious to us now, it was nothing of the sort at the time…

I think all the major prophets—Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad—saw this trend happening, and saw it as their job, perhaps their main job, to help us remember what it was we were quickly leaving behind, curated compiled encapsulated and standardized for distribution as high learning, not as religion per se, but an entire belief system that included philosophy, history and natural science, their respective versions of such…

But it doesn’t seem like such high learning now, just superstition, belief systems crystallized into hard-and-fast religions, silly and superfluous, and hardly capable of adapting to modern life in the modern world. I’d like to change all that. The major problem, of course, is that with regard to the natural sciences, they are mightily outgunned. Solution: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Leave Science to the scientists. That includes Creation Myths. Religion should have other tasks…

(There is scarcely a theory of Science that is necessary for everyday life, so the ancient belief systems needn’t concern themselves with it. They have plenty to do caring for the history they carry embedded, and the core values which they hold as sacred. To that and from that may be discarded the ancient animosities and upgraded the ancient survival strategies…)

“Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering”—Sam Harris

This statement, of course, is not true at all, and speaks badly for any atheist who wants to be taken seriously, and even us non-theists, though that is not the same thing, not at all. Morality is all about right and wrong, pure and simple, happiness and suffering only indirectly affected, if at all, and certainly not happiness and suffering of the material wealth or poverty sort…

I dismiss much of the rantings and ravings of Atheist apologists, BUT: Sam Harris did have one interesting thing to say in his book “Letter to a Christian Nation,” i.e. that Christ suffering for our sins was a latter-day manifestation of the previous habit of sacrificial offerings to diverse gods. BUT: JC did it willingly. And so do we…

The main purpose of religion, of course, is to provide a system of belief and promote the doing of good things in the world, and the best ways to accomplish that are adapted to the land of its creation and the direction of its absorption. And they have all been successful, with only some misguided naysayers assuming that we’d be better off without the lot of ’em…

If that were true, we wouldn’t have them. The atheists and anarchists assume that we’d be better off without any governments or religions, but that is pure fantasy, and a faulty reading of history. The species has been inoculated with religion, like it or not, and has progressed handily and headily from it. Only now is that inoculation beginning to wear off, as we forget the lessons of the past and don’t even bother with getting to know our neighbors…

Bottom line: there is no way to know which is more real, the apparent objects in the world, or our consciousness of them. Which came first: the egg or the consciousness of it? Good question. And in reality, there is no way to prove either position. That is why it is an article of faith, as generally assumed on the consciousness-based ‘spiritual’ side, though generally not accepted as such for the materialist side…

So maybe the best I can do is to mention some other common-sense items now in the trash-bin of formerly-accepted ‘truth’: 1) gender solidity, i.e. men are men and women are women, with specific assigned roles, and never shall the two reverse, or mix, or achieve fluidity; 2) the planets, including Earth, are solid unchanging entities, in fixed circular orbits; and 3) Subject-verb-object is the ‘normal’ word order. Is that enough, or should I go on?

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Speaking as an agnostic who flirts with atheism, I can only applaud your identification of materialism as the villain of the piece. Developing/evolving our creative and more spiritual side seems to be the way forward.

Flirting is fine, but I could never truly consider myself an atheist, though non-theist is different. Mostly I just want to consider all the possibilities, like Plato before me. And the fact that almost all near-death experiences involve ‘a light’ is a fact that I can’t ignore…

On fact, only the early and immature forms of materialism can be considered as acts of faith or, as F. Engels put it, “metaphysics”. In his famous “Anti-Duehring” (published in 1877), he has already presented a critique of this “common sense” based materialism. From this book, I once used the following quote as the motto of my master’s dissertation that I prepared 102 years later:
“Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.”

By contrast, dialectical materialism goes far beyond this “common sense” based materialism. Needless to state that nowadays hardly anyone knows and cares about dialectical materialism, including most scientists. And of course, today much could be added to and modified in Engels’ materialism – WITHOUT FALLING BACK BELOW THE LEVEL THAT HE HAD ALREADY ACHIEVED IN THE 19TH CENTURY, and without falling back into religious mysticism that probably was adequate thinking for feudal and pre-feudal societies (and is dying away to the extent society progresses – good riddance!!). Of course, in times of major crises of the more advanced societies, old religious murmurs tend to come back – as crisis symptoms, NOT as useful recipes for the future!

Here is a more extensive Engels quote that should clarify things: “Real natural science dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, and thence onward it has advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables, in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the preceding centuries.

To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. “His communication is ‘yea, yea; nay, nay’; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” [Matthew 5:37. — Ed.] For him a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another, cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis one to the other.

At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees.

For everyday purposes we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that this is, in many cases, a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing of the child in its mother’s womb is murder. It is just as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death is not an instantaneous momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted process.

In like manner, every organic being is every moment the same and not the same, every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other atoms of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed and that despite all their opposition, they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.

None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending.”